Tuesday, December 27, 2011

The Treblinka Camp

Following the construction
and start of operations in Belzec and Sobibor, and just prior to Wirth’s
recommendations to rebuild Belzec’s gas chambers, another camp was established
in the summer of 1942 in the north-eastern area of the Warsaw district in the
General Government. The Treblinka camp was located in a remote and forested
area four kilometres from the Treblinka station on the main Warsaw-Bialystok
railway line. Spread out on some 50 acres in a rectangular fashion, the camp
was surrounded by a 3-4 meter high wire fence, later fitted with tree branches
and brushwood to block any outside view into the camp, while the inside of the
camp was further secured by an additional barbed wire fence, staffed by
constant security surveillance in eight meter high watch towers in all corners
of the camp.[86]

The camp consisted of three similarly sized sections: a
living area for the camp workers, a reception area for arrivals, and the
extermination area. The reception area, which lacked any proper train platform
for the arrivals but simply consisted of a 300 meter long railway spur and
undressing barracks, was the site where men were separated from women and
children, and where the victims dispensed with their clothing and valuables. From
the reception area, arrivals were fed through a 60 meter long “tube” (known as
the Himmelstrasse/”road to heaven” at Treblinka), which was surrounded by a
barbed wire fence on both sides, interwoven with tree branches and foliage to
block any outside observation, and which directed arrivals to the extermination
area.[87]

Work began on the camp sometime in May-June 1942,
following Himmler’s visit to Warsaw on April 17, 1942.[88] Nearby
Jewish slave laborers and Polish prisoners were utilized to construct the camp,
a project which was overseen by SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla.[89] Pole
Lucjan Puchala described the initial construction of Treblinka:

Initially we did not know the purpose of
building the branch track, and it was only at the end of the job that I found
out from the conversations among Germans that the track was to lead to a camp
for Jews. The work took two weeks, and it was completed on 15 June 1941.
Parallel to the construction of the track, earthworks continued. The works were
supervised by a German, an SS captain. At the beginning, Polish workers from
the labour camp, which had already been operating in Treblinka, were used as
the workforce. Subsequently, Jews from Wegrow and Stoczek Wegrowski started to
be brought in by trucks. There were 2-3 trucks full of Jews that were daily
brought in to the camp. The SS-men and Ukrainians supervising the work killed a
few dozen people from those brought in to work every day. So that when I looked
from the place where I worked to the place where the Jews worked, the field was
covered with corpses. The imported workers were used to dig deep ditches and to
build various barracks. In particular, I know that a building was built of
bricks and concrete, which, as I learned later, contained people-extermination
chambers.[90]

The problems experienced with the wooden gas chambers at Sobibor
and Belzec must have persuaded the Treblinka staff to erect more solid
structures for their operations, as testified to by Puchala, Jankiel Wiernik,[91] and
Abraham Krzepicki.[92]
The three original chambers each measured approximately 5 x 5 meters, and
around 2 meters high.[93] Polish prisoner Jan Sulkowski, interned at
the Treblinka labor-penal camp, testified about his experience in constructing
the new gas chambers:

SS men said it was to be a bath. Only later
on, when the building was almost completed, I realized that it was to be a gas
chamber. What was indicative of it was a special door of thick steel, insulated
with rubber, twisted with a bolt and placed in an iron frame, and also the fact
that in one of the building compartments there was put an engine, from which
three iron pipes led through the roof to the three remaining parts of the
building. A specialist from Berlin came to put the tiles inside and he told me
that he had already built such a chamber elsewhere.[94]

While the door was more
likely to be wooden with steel accessories and components rather than all
steel, the description of tiles in the chambers by Sulkowski are supported by
other witnesses as well.[95]

Wachmann Nikolay Shalayev, who was assigned near the gas
chambers at Treblinka, similarly testified:

Each chamber was 4 x 4, that is 16 square
meters and was 2 meters high. The walls and floor of this chamber were inlaid
with parquet slabs.[96]A
gas pipe of approximately 80 millimeter diameter, which terminated with an
opening of this size, passed from the attic to the ceiling of the chamber. In
order to camouflage it and deceive the doomed people who had entered this
chamber, three spouts hung from the ceiling, like in a real bath in shower
stalls. But in actuality these “showers” were not real. In the ceiling there
was a small window 40 x 40 cm in dimension made of thick (with wire inside)
glass, through which a murky light entered. There were no more objects in the
chamber.[97]

Abraham Goldfarb worked in the original building for a
few days, dragging corpses to the pits, and he described the chambers during a
September 1944 testimony given to Soviet military investigators:

Approach to the building was protected by a
barbed wire fence, with pine branches interwoven into the fence for disguise.
The building itself was an ordinary one-story brick building with a tin roof.
Climbing the stairs to the entrance you first get to the wooden annex, which
looked like a corridor. The front door to the building, as well as three iron
doors leading out of this annex to the three chambers of the house are
hermetically sealed. Each of the three chambers had these three dimensions:
length - 5, width - 4, height - 2 meters. Floor and walls are covered with
tiles, the ceiling is made of concrete. In each chamber there is one hole in
the ceiling. Moreover, it is covered with netting. From a wall into a chamber
comes a pipe with somewhat of a flared end and mesh bottom. The flared end is
mounted near the wall. The wall at this location is significantly polluted with
soot. Against the entrance door there is also a hermetically closed exit door.
All three of these chambers open in the direction of the concrete ramp
installed near the house.[98]

Another Jewish witness
from the extermination part, Mendel Korytnicki, who also worked for a short
period (about 5 days) in the original gas chambers, agrees with Goldfarb’s
description: giving the same dimensions and mentions the openings in the roof
(through which a German was observing the process), the tiled floor, and the
concrete platform. Korytnicki only differs with Goldfarb in regard to the roof
material (saying that it was a tiled roof) and saying that the walls were
whitewashed, rather than tiled – expected differences in recollection.[99]

Image 5.2 Plan of the old gas chambers drawn by First
Lieutenant of Justice Yurovsky in September 1944, apparently based on the
testimony of Abraham Goldfarb.
Source: GARF 7445-2-134, p. 39.

Legend to Image 5.2:

1. Annex.

2. The engine room.

3, 4, 5. Chambers.

6. Living room for the personnel.

7. The ramp.

The red line: the exhaust pipe from the engine.

а.
Gas inlet in the chamber.

б.
The window through which the gas was let out on the roof.

в.
Door.

As the construction of Treblinka was underway Dr.
Irmfried Eberl, a former commander during the euthanasia program, took charge
of the camp and would remain so until late August. On July 7, 1942, Dr. Eberl
sent a letter to the Commissar of the Warsaw ghetto Dr. Heinz Auerswald
announcing Treblinka’s readiness to commence operations starting July 11, 1942,
obviously related to the coming deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to
Treblinka.[100]
Deportations to the camp began July 22, 1942.

During the first phase of Treblinka’s role as a death
camp (July 23-August 28, 1942), the extermination site lacked the same
efficiency in operation as Belzec and Sobibor. The camp staff simply could not
initially cope with the huge number of transports arriving day after day. As
reported by State Secretary of the Reich Transport Ministry Ganzenmüller to
Himmler’s chief of staff, Wolff, since the opening of the Treblinka camp on
July 22 “a train with 5,000 Jews goes daily from Warsaw via Malkinia to
Treblinka.”[101]
This daily figure of arrivals was larger than both Sobibor and Belzec’s
combined. It also was the cause of utter havoc at the camp.[102]

Many deportation cars had to wait hours and days on end
until Treblinka’s gas chambers were cleared of their previous transport. As
already described in the chapter on deportations,[103] during
the hot summer months the many deportations of ghetto Jews to Treblinka, often
with heavily crammed trains lacking food and water, produced gruesome results
before even arriving at the camp. German soldier Hubert Pfoch, who happened to
follow a transport of Jews to Treblinka, recorded in his diary what he
witnessed in August 1942 at the Siedlce train station:

Early next morning - August 22 - our
train was shunted on to another track, just next to the loading platform, and
this was when we heard the rumour that these people were a Jewish
transport. They call out to us that they
have been traveling without food or water for two days. And then, when they are being loaded into
cattle cars, we become witnesses of the most ghastly scenes. The corpses of those killed the night before
were thrown by Jewish auxiliary police on to a lorry that came and went four
times (…) When some of them manage to climb out through the ventilating holes,
they are shot the moment they reach the ground-a massacre that made us sick to
our souls, a blood-bath such as I never dreamed of (…) Eventually our train
followed the other train and we continued to see corpses on both sides of the
track - children and others. They say
Treblinka is a ‘delousing camp’. When we
reach Treblinka station the train is next to us again - there is such an awful
smell of decomposing corpses in the station, some of us vomit. The begging for water intensifies, the
indiscriminate shooting by the guards continues.... Three hundred thousand have
been assembled here. Every day ten or fifteen thousand are gassed and
burned. Any comment is totally
superfluous.[104]

Abraham Krzepicki
described his experience en route to Treblinka from Warsaw:

Over 100 people were packed into our car (…)
it is impossible to describe the tragic situation in our airless, closed
freight car. It was one big toilet. Everyone tried to push his war to a small
air aperture. Everyone was lying on the floor. I also lay down. I found a crack
in one of the floorboards into which I pushed my nose in order to get a little
air. The stink in the car was unbearable. People were defecating in all four
corners of the car. (…) People lay on the floor, gasping and shuddering as if
feverish, their heads lolling, labouring to get some air into their lungs. Some
were in complete despair and no longer moved (…) We reached Treblinka. (…) Many
were inert on the freight-car floor, some probably dead. We had been traveling
for about twenty hours. If the trip had taken another half day, the number of
dead would have been much higher. We would all have died of heat and
asphyxiation. I later learned that there were transports to Treblinka from
which only corpses were removed.[105]

Oskar Berger, who was brought to Treblinka in mid-late
August 1942 during the time of this havoc, spoke of his first encounter with
the camp:

As we disembarked we witnessed a horrible
sight: hundreds of bodies lying all around. Piles of bundles, clothes, valises,
everything mixed together. SS soldiers, Germans and Ukrainians were standing on
the roofs of barracks and firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Men, women,
and children fell bleeding. The air was filled with screaming and weeping.
Those not wounded by the shooting were forced through an open gate, jumping
over the dead and wounded, to a square fenced with barbed wire.[106]

The camp was not as efficient as hoped. It took time
before a smooth running of the gas chambers could be routinely achieved, as
sometimes the gassing was stopped while the victims were still alive.
Body-removal was another area which took experimentation and improvement, as
hand pushed transport trolleys used to remove corpses to mass graves were found
to be too inefficient and unreliable for continuous use. Meanwhile, the
clothing and valuables of the victims continued to pile up, as there were no
real efforts to process and remove them from the camp, yet the transports
continued to pour in.[107] Samuel
Willenberg recorded that he viewed a pile of clothing some ten meters high in
the sorting yard, with thousands of other objects lying all around.[108]

The situation was so out of control that Treblinka
commander Eberl wrote to his wife Ruth on July 30, 1942 regarding the
tremendous amount of work needed to be done in the camp and of working very
late into the night, noting that “even if there were four of me and each day
was 100 hours long, this would surely not be enough.”[109] Eberl
further wrote that there was a limit on how much he could report to his wife about
his work “since you represent for me the beautiful part in my life, you should
not know everything about it.” Thomas Kues has addressed these letters by Eberl
in isolation, highlighting the point that they don’t provide any direct
statements referring to gassings or exterminations by themselves.[110] This
point is correct, but only stands through dishonestly de-contextualizing
Eberl’s letters, removing them from the wider array of evidence showing the
problematic start to operations in Treblinka and the details of those actions.[111]

As the gas chambers were filled and sometimes unusable
due to engine breakdowns, other methods were relied upon to eliminate the
transports. In addition to Oskar Berger’s testimony on shootings upon his
arrival at Treblinka, Jankiel Wiernik, who also arrived in late August 1942,
described the scene at the reception area:

The place was littered with corpses. Some
clothed, others naked. They were black and swollen. Their faces were expressing
fear and terror. Their eyes wide open, tongue stretched out, brains splattered,
bodies disfigured. Blood everywhere.[112]

Chaos begot chaos in the
Treblinka bloodbath.

These birthing pains were likely experienced in Belzec
and Sobibor as well, but were not as noticeable or unbearable in these camps as
they were not overloaded with deportations beyond the breaking point; Treblinka
was. As SS-Unterscharführer August Hingst testified, “Dr. Eberl’s ambition was
to reach the highest possible numbers and exceed all the other camps.” Hingst
correctly summed up the situation at the camp: “So many transports arrived that
the disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled.”[113]

Treblinka’s mismanagement did not go unnoticed by Eberl’s
superiors. Following a bureaucratic recognition to better organize and improve
the extermination process in the Reinhard camps, former Belzec commander
Christian Wirth was appointed inspector of all three death camps in early
August 1942. Towards the end of that same month, Wirth joined Globocnik in an
inspection of the camp. Oberhauser, Wirth’s assistant, later testified:

In Treblinka the operation had broken down.
It was probably that more transports arrived than the camp could cope with. I
recall that a transport train was still not unloaded, also that the camp was
overcrowded with Jews and that bodies of bloated Jews were also lying around
everywhere.[114]

As a result of the visit,
Eberl was dismissed and quickly replaced by Sobibor commander Stangl, who was
available at the time as Sobibor had been closed for several weeks by that
point. Upon his arrival at the camp, Stangl was shocked by the situation:

Treblinka that day was the most awful thing
I saw during all of the Third Reich (…) It was Dante’s Inferno. It was Dante
come to life. When I entered the camp
and got out of the car on the square [the Sortie­rungsplatz].Istepped knee-deep into money; I didn’t know which way to turn, where to
go. I waded in notes, currency, precious
stones, jewellery, clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the
square. The smell was indescribable; the
hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying.[115]

Following Stangl was his new deputy, Kurt Franz, who had
worked at Belzec prior to his new promotion from Wirth. Franz also remembered
that the camp was littered with corpses when he arrived, and that they had been
there for some time as they “were already bloated.”[116]
Quickly calling for a halt to the madness, Wirth requested that all transports
to Treblinka cease; Globocnik agreed, giving the camp a much needed respite as
of August 28, 1942. With the suspension in further arrivals, the new camp
leadership used the time to clear the scattered corpses and reorganize the operation
of the camp, with Wirth informing the camp personnel of the new process. SS-Scharführer
Franz Suchomel described Wirth’s new orders:

Wirth gave detailed instructions as to the
liquidations of the transports and to the incorporation of the Jewish working
commandos into his process. His instructions were detailed. For example, they
described how to open the doors of the freight cars, the disembarking of the
Jews, the passage through the “tube” to the upper part of the camp. Wirth
personally gave an order that when the Jews were taking off their shoes they
had to tie them together. …Wirth’s instructions were carried out even after he
left Treblinka.[117]

On September 3, 1942, nearly a week after halting
transports to Treblinka, deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the camp were
renewed. Trains were divided into smaller sections, so that the camp did not
have to process the entire load of Jews at once. Jews were now employed in the
reception area to ensure a proper processing of the victims’ valuables and
clothing, as well as to handle any corpses found in the transports. A ramp was
also built so that arrivals could get off the railcars more easily.

Additionally, the camp began the process of selecting out
those Jews incapable of walking at a hurried pace to the gas chambers (elderly,
sick, some children). Instead of being herded to the gas chamber, they were
taken by Jewish workers wearing Red Cross armbands to the Lazarett/“hospital,”
which was hardly anything more than about a 7 meter deep grave.[118] There
they were shot and buried along with other bodies of dead arrivals.[119] One of
the executioners, SS-Unterscharführer Willi Mentz (who Mattogno and Graf
misspell as ‘Metz’)[120],
described the action there:

In the Lazarett area the arrivals were set
or placed on the edge of the grave. When no more sick or wounded were expected,
it was my task to shoot these people. This was done by a shot into their neck
with a 9 mm pistol. Those shot fell into the grave or to the side and were
carried down into the grave by two Lazarett work Jews. The corpses were
sprinkled with chlorinated lime. Later they were burned in the grave on the
instruction of Wirth.[121]

Mentz’s superior, SS-Scharführer
August Miete, testified about the actions there, “I want to say that, in total,
I shot hundreds of different people: those sick from the transport, sick and
fallen from the work commandos, and other sorts.”[122]

These executions have almost entirely been ignored by MGK
in their studies on the Reinhard camps. Only in the recent Sobibór work
are a very small number of shootings conceded, which they suspect to be part of
an ongoing euthanasia program upon the deportees to be sent further east.[123] Their
theory greatly distorts the clear purpose of these shootings, and also ignores
their true scale.

Despite the many problems with the initial operation at
Treblinka, the camp still managed to process many thousands of Jews prior to
the August-September halt of new arrivals. Within the first two and a half
months, more than 250,000 Jews from Warsaw had been brought to the camp, along
with tens of thousands from the Radom district.[124]

Yet, the Treblinka bloodbath was not the only problem
facing Aktion Reinhard chief Globocnik, as the fuel supply for his camps was
not as high as wished. On September 4, 1942, Globocnik wrote to Werner
Grothmann, a member of Himmler’s RSHA staff, complaining about the reduction in
his fuel allotment:

Dear Grothmann,As an SS and Police Chief my engine fuel
rations have once again been painfully reduced. I could carry out Einsatz
‘Reinhard’ until now with my allotment. This present cutback restricts the
operation still further. As large foreign deliveries are imminent, please factor
these circumstances into consideration. I ask you to obtain a special ration
exclusively for this action from a proper Reich Office. SS-Obergruppenführer
Krueger is not in the position to issue more engine fuel to me.SS and Police Chief for the District of
Lublin,Globocnik[125]

The “large foreign
deliveries” (grosse Auslandsanlieferungen) that Globocnik referred to were the
expected deportations of many Romanian Jews to Belzec, which were discussed in
late August, but never commenced.[126] The
terminology that Globocnik used (Treibstoff) explicitly refers to engine fuels,
from which the gas chambers operated. It is also possible that the fuel was
required for excavating work on mass graves and possibly also cremations, which
began at Sobibor shortly after the time of this letter, especially with reports
of corpse incinerations in August which are available from Belzec and Treblinka.[127] The
two scenarios are mutually reinforcing, as opposed to contradicting of one
another. Such a heavy requirement of fuel stands in stark contrast to a
supposed transit camp, in which there typically were no uses of fuel besides
power generators, which would not require a substantial amount.

Quickly following the reorganization of the extermination
procedure at Treblinka in September, the new camp Kommandant Stangl sought to
increase the camp’s gassing capacity and moved to construct an additional set
of gas chambers. SS-Unterscharführer Willi Mentz discussed the changes to the
camp:

When I came to Treblinka the camp commandant was a doctor
named Dr. Eberl. He was very ambitious. It was said that he ordered more
transports than could be "processed" in the camp. That meant that
trains had to wait outside the camp because the occupants of the previous
transport had not yet all been killed. At the time it was very hot and as a
result of the long wait inside the transport trains in the intense heat many
people died. At the time whole mountains of bodies lay on the platform. The
Hauptsturmführer Christian Wirth came to Treblinka and kicked up a terrific
row. And then one day Dr. Eberl was no longer there...For about two months I worked in
the upper section of the camp and then after Eberl had gone everything in the
camp was reorganized. The two parts of the camp were separated by barbed wire
fences. Pine branches were used so that you could not see through the fences.
The same thing was done along the route from the "transfer" area to
the gas chambers...Finally, new and larger gas
chambers were built. I think that there were now five or six larger gas
chambers. I cannot say exactly how many people these large gas chambers held.
If the small gas chambers could hold 80-100 people, the large ones could
probably hold twice that number.[128]

Camp worker Jankiel
Wiernik, who wrote about his experiences shortly after his liberation,
described the construction of the new gas chambers soon after his arrival:

The new construction job between Camp No. 1
and Camp No. 2, on which I had been working, was completed in a very short
time. It turned out that we were building ten additional gas chambers, more
spacious than the old ones, 7 by 7 meters or about 50 square meters. As many as
1,000 to 1,200 persons could be crowded into one gas chamber. The building was
laid out according to the corridor system, with five chambers on each side of
the corridor. Each chamber had two doors, one door leading into the corridor
through which the victims were admitted; the other door, facing the camp, was
used for the removal of the corpses. (…) The work on these gas chambers lasted
five weeks, which to us seemed like centuries. (…) New transports of victims
arrived each day. They were immediately ordered to disrobe and were led to the
three old gas chambers, passing us on the way. Many of us saw our children,
wives and other loved ones among the victims. And when, on the impulse of
grief, someone rushed to his loved ones, he would be killed on the spot. It was
under these conditions that we constructed death chambers for our brethren and
ourselves.[129]

Image 5.3: Plan of the new gas chambers drawn by First
Lieutenant of Justice Yurovsky in September 1944 apparently based on the
testimony of Abraham Goldfarb.
Source: GARF 7445-2-134, l. 40.

Legend:
1-10. Chambers.

11. Corridor.

12. The engine room.

а.
Gas inlet in the chamber.

б.
Outlet for exhausting gas from the chamber.

в.
Exit door.

The red line: the exhaust pipe from the engine into
the chambers.

In his Treblinka account with Graf, Mattogno criticized
Wiernik for failing to include a vent opening to remove engine exhaust from the
gas chambers; instead, they believe the Soviets fabricated such an opening into
their drawings to make the gassing claims more technically plausible.
Unfortunately, such a conclusion can only be supported through sloppy research
and ignorance.[130]
Treblinka worker Abraham Goldfarb, who took part in the gas chamber
construction at Treblinka but who has been entirely ignored by MGK, stated for the new chambers that
“there was a separate opening in the roof” for the removal of gas, while also
noting that the older gas chambers had a similar vent. Wiernik himself wrote
that the new gas chambers had an “outlet on the roof” with a “hermetic cap,”
with the cap clearly being removable to ventilate out exhaust gas from the
chambers. While Mattogno criticizes Wiernik for failing to provide for an
exhaust vent[131],
they quote the relevant testimony from Wiernik in the same book.[132] Such
sloppiness is inexcusable.

Mattogno has have alleged that Wiernik plagiarized a map
from the November 15, 1942 Treblinka report in order to “lend credibility to
his claims.”[133]
They list numerous similarities between the maps of the November 1942 report
and the one included Wiernik’s 1944 account, and criticize him for failing to
include cremation grills.[134]
Unfortunately for the deniers, there is no evidence that Wiernik actually drew
or sketched the map that was included in his book; indeed, nowhere in the text
of his account does Wiernik refer to the map illustration. Instead, it is more
likely that the Polish underground publisher included the map on their own
accord to better help the reader follow Wiernik’s account, making Mattogno and
Graf’s criticism over the map irrelevant.[135]
Wiernik did testify during the Eichmann trial to drawing a map of Treblinka in
1944[136], which
was subsequently published in 1945; Mattogno claims that with this map “the
plagiarism shows up even more glaringly,” but do not provide any details or
reasoning behind their statement. A simple comparison of the two maps (see
image 5.4) shows anything but plagiarism.[137]

Image 5.4: Compare
the map included in Wiernik’s 1944 report (left) with the map Wiernik testified
to drawing (right)

Moving past Mattogno’s distorted and dishonest criticism
of Wiernik, sometime in late September/early October 1942, the additional gas
chambers opened for operation. Chil Rajchman (aka Henryk Reichman), who arrived
in the camp on October 11, 1942, was able to witness and later work at the
newly built gas chambers:

It is worth mentioning that at the time I
began working in the death camp, there were two gassing structures in
operation. The larger one had ten chambers, into each of which as many as four
hundred people could enter. Each chamber was 7 metres long by 7 metres wide.
People were stuffed into them like herrings. When one chamber was full, the
second one was opened, and so on. Small transports were brought to the smaller
structure, which had three gas chambers, each of which could could 450 to 500
persons.[138]

Rajchman wrote more
specifically about the newly built gas chambers:

The size of the gas chamber is 7 by 7
metres. In the middle of the chamber there are shower heads through which the
gas is introduced. On one of the walls a thick pipe serves as an exhaust to
remove the air. Thick felt around the doors of the chamber renders them
airtight.[139]

In a response to Rajchman’s
writings, Thomas Kues raised several objections to his statements on the gas
chambers at Treblinka. Pertaining to the additional gas chamber building, Kues
is only able to criticize the guesses of different capacities given by Rajchman
and Wiernik for the 10 new chambers (Rajchman said 400 per chamber, Wiernik
said 1,000-1,200).[140] Such
variations in witness testimony, while noteworthy, do not amount to a genuine
reason to discount the reliability of either witness; witnesses are notorious
for providing a wide range of estimates on an un-quantified and unknown figure.
More generally, the differences between Wiernik and Rajchman certainly are not
evidence of a wider conspiracy or hoax that MGK ultimately conclude; instead,
the variation is more realistically due to different perceptions, experiences,
and memories among the witnesses regarding a figure that varied from day to
day, and a victim count which was never specifically announced to the workers.

[91] Wiernik, ‘A Year in Treblinka,’ p.157: “The
brick building which housed the gas chambers was separated from Camp No. 1 by a
wooden wall. This wooden wall and the brick wall of the building together
formed a corridor which was 80 cm taller than the building.”

[92] Krzepicki, ‘Eighteen Days in Treblinka,’ p.105: “longish, not too large brick building."

[95] Krzepicki, ‘Eighteen Days in Treblinka,’ p.104; Wiernik, ‘A Year in
Treblinka,’ p.157.

[96] Obviously tiles are meant here. Earlier Shalayev stated that the
chambers were washed because “the floor and walls of each chamber were inlaid
with parquet and a small amount of soot, which settled on the parquet walls,
was easily washed off with water and wiped off by the workers with damp rags.”

[100] Indicative of MGK’s historical ignorance, in M&G’s work on
Treblinka, Mattogno incorrectly connects this and other letters from Eberl
during summer 1942 to Treblinka I, the labor camp, instead of the new Treblinka
II, the extermination camp.

[101] Ganzenmüller to Wolff, 28.7.1942, NO-2207; Wolff responded on
behalf of Himmler that he was “particularly pleased to learn” that 5,000 Jews
were sent to Treblinka every day.

[102] The problematic start of operations at Treblinka and the subsequent
reorganization are areas which are largely or entirely ignored by MGK. For
instance, M&G’s account of Treblinka, the only reference to the change in
camp leadership is a brief mention through quoting the Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust (p. 13).

[103] See the section The Acceleration of Extermination and Conflicts
over Jewish Labour, in Chapter 3.

[111] Kues also fails to recognize the inductive implications of the
letters by failing to present a plausible alternative hypothesis, but tries to
dismiss its value by suggesting it could apply to anything unpleasant.

[126] On the abortive plan to deport Romanian Jews to the Lublin
district, see Longerich, Holocaust, pp.266-370. Perhaps MGK can explain
why Romanian Jews would be sent north to Galicia, instead of east directly into
the Ukraine or Transnistria?

[137] Among other points, Wiernik’s 1944 map has more buildings in the
reception area, more buildings in the extermination area, slightly different
positioning of various buildings and the path to the gas chambers, has cremation
grates and differently numbered buildings, and does not have any signs of
orientation. The maps also look to be drawn by two different people.